In this early drawing, much influenced by children’s book illustration, three caricatured, capricious-looking comic figures with pointed ears, one of whom casts a strong shadow, stand confidently against a plain background around which Spencer has indicated the tentative beginnings of a decorative border. In about 1905, he began to illustrate fairy tales; many of these drawings have not survived but in 1943 he rediscovered a drawing of a goblin and wrote, ‘All that I now am is there…I love it now in memory, in spite of all its imperfections, its mannered style and lack of imagination.’ He gave three early drawings to his friend Dorothy Wooster when she went away to finishing school at Folkestone, c1908. 

Lent by a private collector